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Connected to personality you can also talk about stress or arousal, how you are, perceive and react on things, will affect the level of stress or arousal.

Stress can be described as a process with four steps that will lead to a particular end.
Step 1 – Environmental demand, competition, new skill etc. (physical and psychological)
Step 2 – Individuals perception of the environmental demands. The perception of the demands will vary between your atheletes (Amount of psychological or physical “threat” perceived)
Step 3 – Response, if your player feel an imbalance between demands and capability, this will create arousal, anxiety, muscle tension, attention changes
Step 4 – Behavior (performance or outcome)

Stress occurs when there is a perceived imbalance between physical and psychological demands and the individuals capability to meet the perceived demands. Too high levels of stress will affect your floorball players performance, but there are also research done, showing an increased risk for injuries.

The more important the floorball event/match is, the more stress provoking it will be. Mental training and feedback can be used on each step (1-4) to adjust the level of stress and to help your player to perform at his/her best. Some players need help to lower the “stress level” (step 1-4), when others might need the opposite, meaning they need to be “stressed” up a little bit to perform at their best (step 1-4).

The last theme on the International coaching training, was goal scoring and goalie techniques. I have chosen to only translate the goal scoring part to floorball from hockey.

I wrote earlier about what is important when you practice to score goals in floorball.
– Shoot quickly
– Shoot with precision
– Shoot hard/fast
– “Hide” the shot
– Shoot unannounced

Here are some other aspects, like the distnace from where you are shooting from.
This is a picture how the goal and goalie looks like from a longer distnace (if you shoot early).

By moving just 1,5 meter closer the goal and goalie, the free space in the goal is radically reduced, and therefore also the goal scoring opportunities.

Shoot earlier if you want the best odds to score a goal in floorball.

Move in the sight

During this lesson, it was also recommended from a goalie point of view to move in the sight a little bit, you don’t need to hit the post and in, to score a goal. Shots close to the goalie body are many times hard to catch and you also minimize the risk of missing the goal totally, and then you will definitely not score goals.

Freeze the goalie

The skill level of the goalies has also dramatically improved, and a technique to improve the goal scoring chances is to “freeze” the goalie before the actual shot or pass to teammate. Freezing means the goalie is totally prepared for shot in first moment, but instead the shot or pass comes in the next moment.
This can be done with a small shot feint, pass feint or other move that makes the goalie believe “OK, now the shot comes”. When the goalie makes a small reaction in the first step, it will reduce the time for the actual save in the next step, either it’s a shot or pass to a teammate who will shoot.

The most impressive presentation during the coach training, was the Norwegian one. So good content and fantastic presentation by Roy Johansen (National team coach) and his colleague from Olympic coaching team.

Roy Johansen to the left

Norway started their development by thinking of, what are the best teams / nations doing? What does the best hockey (floorball) player do, what skills do they have, and what skills are they masters of?

Then they continued with working with their own team identity, who are we? What can we be best in? What can we control? Can we chase the other team all over the rink?

As an output from this, Team Norway could get some answers and identify areas to focus on. The key area was the answer to the questions, What can we be best in? What can we control? We can be physically prepared.
Therefore they
– Created a physical training development stair, with defined levels of, what is world class.
– Started an “Ironman” competition for all players and teams, that is run before the season starts.
– Defined their way of playing hockey (floorball)
– Defined team values, or valuing words to describe wanted behavior within the team.
– Set goals short and long term

Still Denmark is in the highest division in hockey, I will altough also talk about Norway, they have done an impressive work, with small resources!

What have Denmark done then?

One of the focus areas have been to have short and quick attacks, if you have not scored after 15 seconds you can give the ball (puck) to the other team, like the Norwegian national football team manager “Drillo” Olsen once said.

The Danish team have also been working with tactic and the discipline to stick to it, teambuilding, social environment and technical skills (opposite to Norway). What they are not good in regarding the national team coaches, is the physical part, they are too weak. The hard practicing culture is not there…

About the future…

Regarding the future for Danish hockey, Per Bäckman was quite negative, “we are at the top now, we will not get better, and we will not get more players or rinks, we need to take care of what we have now and try to maintain that.”

Wrong attitude…

In my mind totally wrong attitude, you will always need development and try to recruit new players and develop the game, players and teams, the same goes for floorball. When you think you can not develop or are satisfied, you will start to roll down the hill you are climbing and be eliminated in the end!

Danish Hockey a good story (name of the presentation) – They have done a good work, but it will not last for so long, with the attitude I have described above…

“You have totally different view on game system and tactics than Sweden?”
“Yes, I can not understand, why you would chase another players on the ice for 60 minutes” /Per Bäckman

I continue with some valuable things from Dave Smiths lecture, from the international coaching seminarium.

He talked about the complexity in hockey, you need to skate, do stick handling and take decissions, which is not possible if you haven’t automized some of the skills or moves. If your skating isn’t automized, you need to focus on that and loose stick handling and good decissions.

Same principles can be applied on floorball, if you don’t have good and fast feets moving automatically, you will have problems with the game.
1. Quick and fast feets (coordination skills)
2. Good stick handling skills
will automatically give you more time on focusing on the game itself and to make good decissions during the game.

Test the footwork and coordination skills

You can test these coordination skills by a simple practice. Let your players run standing on the same spot, add stick handling and start to ask them questions. Do they drop in speed or have problems performing these two things together, then you know you need to work extra either on footwork or stick handling. Below an example from the stick handling and ball control eBook found on this page >>

…Floorball Goalie Trainer or Goal Scoring Coach, Part 3
Looking at goal scoring, shooting skills and practicing focus, you could say that much of the focus is today on, taking rebounds and creating a mask, traffic or wall in front of the goalie to reduce the visibility, when the shot comes.

This will be important in future, but increased training focus will need to be on shooting skills and scoring goals, with different types of shooting techniques like:
– Wrist shot
– Snap shot
– “Slap shot”
– Backhand
– Shooting unannounced and in movement sideways
and to be able to shoot with the weight (centre of gravity) on both feets, left or right (the foot that is in front).

“In NHL the shots will not come through if you don’t shoot fast and quick”
/Dave Smith, NHL officials health and wellness coach

If you want to see some examples from hockey you can watch Alexander Ovechkin and Phil Kessel. Ovechkin example, start at 00:44, goal scoring skills in practice.

At the beginning of the floorball season every coach meets his or her new floorball players and analyzes their skill-set and knowledge of the game. Lets face facts, most floorball coaches know from the first day whether or not their team is going to be competitive or not, and it just as true that many coaches get frustrated on that very first day. A good floorball coach never lets his team see this frustration.

Focus on the positive! Speak to your floorball players about improvement. From the very first floorball practice, speak of learning skills and working hard. We’ve all seen the comedy routines about the impossibly naïve coach who keeps talking about having fun while his players are getting killed, but in the long run, aren’t sports supposed to be about having a good time while simultaneously building character?

One good communication guideline I can give you, is that, always remember who or what you are speaking to, or about, and pay attention to the situation that you are in. You cannot use the same logic and vocabulary with a group of eight year old floorball players that you would with a team of professional floorball players. You might be able to yell at older players during floorball drills, but you can’t do the same thing to a ten year old floorball player or with a referee during a game.

Above all, always, remember that the world does not circle around you, each floorball game and practice is just a practice, until you start to earn your living on it, then the stakes might be higher.
Every floorball player, parent, spectator, and game official has their own beliefs and sets of priorities. Very few of these people will bend to your desires just because you are a floorball coach. Be prepared to explain what you want and why, this will help you on you floorball coach journey.

Communication starts immediately in the first meeting with your team, players, new people, other floorball coaches, referees etc. the first impressions counts! Dress well, hold your head up high, look into their eyes when you are speaking, and always speak slowly and clearly. Treat everyone with the respect that you hope to earn or get back. (body language)

Listen when others speak and consider what they have to say before you respond. So you respond on the right thing. Ask questions as “receiver”, to secure that you have understood the message from the “sender”.
Make sure that you understand their point of view before continuing the conversation. When you disagree, do so respectfully, clearly state your case and avoid repeating the same points over and over.

Every experienced floorball coach can tell you about leadership tricks that they have learned over the years as floorball coaches. They’ll tell you about how they motivate their floorball players, how they establish discipline and rules and most of the floorball coaches will even be able to give you a few tricks about how to deal with the referees. When they are done, you’ll be left with one conclusion, most of what they are discussing comes down to communication. Good floorball coaches communicate well, what a concept! 😉 You’d think that this would be obvious, but so many floorball coaches, not just floorball coaches, coaches in other sports struggle with this as well, on a regular basis. Many coaches think that they ought to automatically get respect in their role as a coach from their players and the game officials, but like most things, they have to learn to earn it. Good communication skills will accelerate this process. Take a look at the leadership model this can be applied on communication as well or the body language material